CHICAGO — President Donald Trump Monday revived his threat to sending National Guard troops to Chicago after weeks of issuing conflicting statements on his administration’s plans for the city.
The president made the remarks Monday during an Oval Office ceremony in which he signed an executive order to send a task force of National Guard troops and federal law enforcement agents to Memphis — a plan Trump described as a “replica” of his administration’s deployment of troops to Washington, D.C. last month.
“We’re going to be doing Chicago probably next,” Trump told reporters, before twice telling a story about a “very high quality” yet unnamed businessman who urged him to “save Chicago.”
“We’re going to wait a little while but we’re going to save Chicago,” Trump said. “We can’t let it go.”
Elected officials in Chicago and Illinois braced for a military incursion earlier this month following similar statements by the president, who instead pivoted to sending troops to Memphis. Trump’s “Memphis Safe Task Force” will include National Guard troops and a team of agents across each of the Justice Department’s federal law enforcement agencies. The U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee will lead the task force, according to Trump’s order.
Trump said Monday that FBI agents were sent to Memphis four months earlier “for law enforcement operations to get some of the numbers down.”
“They did a great job but we’re sending in the big force now,” Trump said.
Trump also said that his administration similarly sent FBI agents to Chicago on a “moderate basis” and claimed, without citing evidence, to have “brought down crime a little bit.”
Yet that claim followed weeks of misleading depictions of Chicago as a “hellhole” and the “murder capital of the world,” painting a picture of a city nearly beyond repair. Trump’s characterizations of crime in Chicago, however, do not hold up to fact-checks showing dozens of other cities with far higher murder rates or law enforcement data that’s charted an ongoing drop in violent crime in the city. Chicago has seen 288 homicides this year, down 30 percent from this time last year, according to the Police Department’s citywide crime statistics document, which is updated weekly.
Data included in the department’s annual report showed 580 homicides in Chicago in 2024, down 7 percent from 2023 and down about 27 percent from 2021, a year cities across the country saw major spikes in violent crime.
The Monday Oval Office signing ceremony included GOP Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who supported the measure. Memphis Mayor Paul Young has meanwhile said that he did not ask for the National Guard and did not think it would drive down crime, according to the Associated Press.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have both vocally opposed the prospects of military troops patrolling the streets of Chicago.
Earlier this month, Johnson signed a largely symbolic executive order calling on Trump to “stand down from any attempts to deploy the U.S. Armed Forces — including the National Guard — to Chicago.” The order affirmed that local law enforcement would not work alongside federal agents and it called on federal agents to wear uniforms and body cameras and to show their faces.
At a news conference last month, Pritzker told Trump that he was “neither wanted here nor needed here.” Pritzker and Johnson said that they had not been alerted or consulted on any plans to deploy troops to the city.
“If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police,” Pritzker said. “To invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.”
Trump’s Monday order does not detail when troops would be deployed to Memphis, and Trump was again vague on his intentions for Chicago.
Though troops have yet to be deployed to city, immigration agents have fanned out across the Chicago area this month as part of the administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz.” Officials and organizers have reported the presence of agents and ICE vehicles. Some arrests have been confirmed, and ICE officers fatally shot a man last week during an attempted arrest just outside the city in Franklin Park.
Reporters Melody Mercado and Charles Thrush contributed.
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